Last Flight to Stalingrad by Graham Hurley (simple ebook reader .TXT) 📗

admitted to another bottle hidden in his rucksack and Nehmann watched him struggling off the bed to fetch it.

‘That truck,’ Nehmann murmured. ‘The SS truck.’

‘Yeah?’

‘You mentioned bodies.’

‘I did.’

‘What bodies?’

‘God knows. They could have been Jews. They could have been anyone. I think those bastards have given up counting.’

‘But what were they doing here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You saw the bodies?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many?’

‘I didn’t count. Maybe a dozen? All the faces were the same, even the little ones.’

‘The same?’

‘Smashed to pieces. Pulped. All over the place. Think of your friend Messner. They were much worse than that.’

‘Did you talk to anyone? The SS people maybe?’

‘Christ, no.’ At last, he’d found the vodka. He returned to the camp bed in triumph, the new bottle held aloft. The first time he tried to refill Nehmann’s glass, he missed. ‘Kyiv.’ He licked the vodka from his fingertips. ‘Did anyone ever tell you about Kyiv?’

‘Never.’

‘We were there last year. September. Most of the Ivans had gone and the rest were prisoners. Things were settling down nicely then bombs started to go off all over town. People were dying, our people, important people, people who mattered. Our SS friends aren’t subtle. One good deed deserves another. An eye for an eye. Very Old Testament. Ironic, eh?’

Helmut was swaying, the new bottle cradled in one arm like a baby. Nehmann gazed up at him. He was as keen on looted vodka as the next man but knew he had to remember some of this.

‘An eye for an eye?’

‘Ja.Kyiv was a bad place to be a Jew last year. The Ukrainians didn’t like them either. Our SS friends did what they do best, rounded them all up, kicked them into line, took them out of the city. There’s a ravine called Babi Yar. You could hear the shooting all over town. It went on for days. Like I say, no one was counting but in the end I think they ran out of ammunition.’

‘Hundreds?’

‘Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. Kyiv’s a big place but there wasn’t a tailor or a pawnbroker left. All gone.’

Nehmann watched Helmut collapsing softly onto the camp bed. Miraculously, he kept the bottle upright.

‘More, Nehmann?’

Nehmann shook his head. He was thinking about Maria. What was her real name? And how soon before she, too, disappeared into the darkness?

Helmut had closed his eyes. For a moment, Nehmann thought he was asleep but again he was wrong.

‘You know about any of this stuff?’ he mumbled.

‘No.’

‘You should. Everyone should. Tolstoy would, if he was still around.’ His face creased into a smile and his fingers crabbed across the bare earth where he’d left the book. ‘You ever read Tolstoy?’

‘Never.’

‘You should,’ he said again. His eyes opened. ‘There are photos. I took photos.’

‘In Kyiv?’

‘Here. Yesterday. Of the SS truck.’ He tried to hoist himself up on one elbow but failed completely. ‘They’re in that shithole of a developing room, Nehmann. Box on the floor. Maybe you ought to take a look.’

Moments later, finally unconscious, he began to snore. Nehmann was drunk, too, but it made no difference. Maria, he told himself. For her sake. He sat beside the camp bed until he was sure that Helmut had gone. A key, he thought. I have to find a key. The developing room will be locked and there has to be a way to get in.

He started with Helmut’s rucksack, emptying it item by item, clothing, notebooks, a map of Hamburg, half a bar of chocolate, various items of cutlery, a metal cup, three rotting plums tucked inside a sock. No key. Then he found another bag, much smaller, stitched canvas, lying on the other side of the camp bed. More notebooks, a pair of binoculars, two light meters and a small framed photo of a woman sitting on a beach. She had the sun in her eyes and she was squinting at the camera. She looked much older than Helmut, but she was blowing him a playful kiss. Nehmann studied the image for a while, wondering about the life this man had left behind him, then repacked the bag. Still no key.

Helmut was wearing a pair of the loose black trousers favoured by the Propaganda Companies. They had deep buttoned pockets ideal for storing bits and pieces of equipment and he knelt beside the bed, easing the pockets open, slipping his fingers inside. Helmut never stirred, not once. In the second pocket, at the bottom, Nehmann found the keys. There were half a dozen of them on a knotted length of cord.

Outside the tent, the night was darker than ever. Layers of cloud had rolled in from the west and Nehmann could taste rain in the air. He set off across the airfield, making his way through lines of parked Heinkels, ghostly shapes that suddenly materialised from nowhere. Twice he fell, once heavily, rolling over onto his back and staring up at where the stars had once been. The maintenance workshop, with the darkroom attached, felt much further away than he remembered but finally he recognised the pert shape of Richthofen’s Storch and knew he was nearly there.

The door he needed was at the back of the building. He had the keys ready for whatever lock he found but to his surprise the door was already open. He paused in the darkness, running his fingers down the wooden frame. Where the tongue of the lock seated into the rim latch, the wood had been splintered. He paused a moment, trying to remember if the door had been this way before, but knew he couldn’t be certain. Then he put his face to the damaged frame and sniffed. A hint of fresh resin, he thought. Someone’s been here. Recently.

He stepped inside, feeling his way by touch alone. A tiny lobby, then another door into the cubbyhole that Helmut had converted into a darkroom. A box on the floor. Helmut had been specific. Nehmann found it within seconds, bending in the darkness, his arms outstretched. It was a metal box with a flap on top